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19-letter words containing s, a, c, d

  • descriptive grammar — an approach to grammar that is concerned with reporting the usage of native speakers without reference to proposed norms of correctness or advocacy of rules based on such norms.
  • detective constable — a police officer who investigates crime and who is of the lowest rank
  • developable surface — a surface that can be flattened onto a plane without stretching or compressing any part of it, as a circular cone.
  • devil's coach-horse — a large black rove beetle, Ocypus olens, with large jaws and ferocious habits
  • devils-on-horseback — a savoury of prunes wrapped in bacon slices and served on toast
  • dictionary of names — a dictionary of given names that indicates whether a name is usually male, female, or unisex and often includes origins as well as meanings; for example, as by indicating that Evangeline, meaning “good news,” comes from Greek. Used primarily as an aid in selecting a name for a baby, dictionaries of names may also include lists of famous people who have shared a name and information about its current popularity ranking.
  • dielectric constant — Electricity. the ratio of the flux density produced by an electric field in a given dielectric to the flux density produced by that field in a vacuum.
  • digital electronics — (electronics)   The implementation of two-valued logic using electronic logic gates such as and gates, or gates and flip-flops. In such circuits the logical values true and false are represented by two different voltages, e.g. 0V for false and +5V for true. Similarly, numbers are normally represented in binary using two different voltages to represented zero and one. Digital electronics contrasts with analogue electronics which represents continuously varying quantities like sound pressure using continuously varying voltages. Digital electronics is the foundation of modern computers and digital communications. Massively complex digital logic circuits with millions of gates can now be built onto a single integrated circuit such as a microprocessor and these circuits can perform millions of operations per second.
  • direct grant school — (in Britain, formerly) a school financed by endowment, fees, and a state grant conditional upon admittance of a percentage of nonpaying pupils nominated by the local education authority
  • disaster capitalism — the practice (by a government, regime, etc) of taking advantage of a major disaster to adopt liberal economic policies that the population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances
  • disciplinary action — punishment or caution
  • discretionary trust — a trust in which the beneficiaries' shares are not fixed in the trust deed but are left to the discretion of other persons, often the trustees
  • discriminated union — (theory)   The discriminated union of two sets A and B is A + B = {(inA, a) | a in A} U {(inB, b)| b in B} where inA and inB are arbitrary tags which specify which summand an element originates from. A type (especially an algebraic data type) might be described as a discriminated union if it is a sum type whose objects consist of a tag to say which part of the union they belong to and a value of the corresponding type.
  • disenfranchisements — Plural form of disenfranchisement.
  • dispatch department — the department of an organization responsible for the dispatch of orders
  • displaced homemaker — a woman recently divorced, separated, or widowed after many years as a homemaker.
  • displacement engine — any engine employing the rectilinear motion of one or more pistons in cylinders.
  • disseminated cancer — a cancerous tumour that has spread from the site of original growth to a secondary site
  • distance university — a degree-granting institution operating wholly or mainly by correspondence courses for students not resident on or within commuting distance of the campus.
  • distillation column — a type of still fitted with interior baffles, used for fractional distillation. Compare still2 (def 1).
  • distinctive feature — a feature of the sound system of a language that serves as the crucial distinguishing mark between two phonemes, as the distinctive feature of voicing, which distinguishes b from p in English, or nasality, which distinguishes m from b and p.
  • dobsonian telescope — a relatively inexpensive Newtonian telescope, suitable for visual but not photographic use, in which the tube assembly slips freely in the lower base.
  • dry-bulk cargo ship — a ship that carries an unpackaged dry cargo such as coal or grain; bulk carrier
  • dutchman's-breeches — a plant, Dicentra cucullaria, of the fumitory family, having long clusters of pale-yellow, two-spurred flowers.
  • dynamic positioning — Dynamic positioning is the use of computers to control the position of a semi-submersible rig.
  • dynamic translation — (architecture)   A virtual machine implementation approach, used to speed up execution of byte-code programs. To execute a program unit such as a method or a function, the virtual machine compiles its bytecodes into (hardware) machine code. The translated code is also placed in a cache, so that next time that unit's machine code can be executed immediately, without repeating the translation. This technique was pioneered by the commercial Smalltalk implementation currently known as VisualWorks, in the early 1980s. Currently it is also used by some implementations of the Java Virtual Machine under the name JIT (Just In Time compilation).
  • dynatron oscillator — type of oscillator
  • ecatepec de morelos — a city in S central Mexico, a suburb of Mexico City: on a 12th-century Aztec site.
  • educational adviser — a person who provides advice and training to teachers about teaching methods and educational policies
  • eilean donan castle — a castle near the Kyle of Lochalsh in Highland, Scotland: built in the 13th century; famous for its picturesque setting
  • elastic deformation — In elastic deformation a material changes shape when a stress is applied to it but goes back to its original state when the stress is removed.
  • electrocardiographs — Plural form of electrocardiograph.
  • electrodynamometers — Plural form of electrodynamometer.
  • electrostatic field — an electric field associated with static electric charges
  • endowment assurance — a form of life insurance that provides for the payment of a specified sum directly to the policyholder at a designated date or to his beneficiary should he die before this date
  • endowment insurance — Endowment insurance is a type of life insurance that pays a particular sum directly to the policyholder at a stated date, or to a beneficiary if the policyholder dies before this date.
  • factitious disorder — any of various syndromes, as Münchausen syndrome, characterized by physical or psychological symptoms intentionally produced by a person and under voluntary control.
  • fallacy of division — the fallacy of inferring that a property of the whole is also a property of parts or members of the whole (opposed to fallacy of composition).
  • family-sized packet — a large packet
  • fashion coordinator — a person in a department store or other establishment who coordinates activities centered upon or related to fashion, as fashion themes, shows, displays, and promotion.
  • feast of dedication — Hanukkah.
  • financial ombudsman — any of five British ombudsmen: the Banking Ombudsman, set up in 1986 to investigate complaints from bank customers; the Building Society Ombudsman, set up in 1987 to investigate complaints from building society customers; the Insurance Ombudsman, set up in 1981 to investigate complaints by policyholders (since 1988 this ombudsman has also operated a Unit Trust Ombudsman scheme); the Investment Ombudsman set up in 1989 to investigate complaints by investors (the Personal Investment Authority Ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints by personal investors); and the Pensions Ombudsman, set up in 1993 to investigate complaints regarding pension schemes
  • first-sale doctrine — a legal principle allowing the purchaser of a lawfully made copy of a copyright-protected work to sell or give away that copy without permission but not to reproduce it.
  • five o'clock shadow — the rather dark stubble that appears on a man's face some hours after shaving, typically in the late afternoon if he shaved in the morning.
  • five-o'clock shadow — the rather dark stubble that appears on a man's face some hours after shaving, typically in the late afternoon if he shaved in the morning.
  • fixed cost contract — a contract in which the costs do not vary
  • fluophosphoric acid — fluorophosphoric acid.
  • foundation subjects — the subjects studied as part of the National Curriculum, including the compulsory core subjects
  • francesca da rimini — Francesca da, Francesca da Rimini.
  • functional database — (database, language)   A database which uses a functional language as its query language. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a purely functional language would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically scalable, the update mechanism must clearly be destructive rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the query language to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a monad to encapsulate database access and ensure it was single threaded. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's linear type system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon Backus' FP language, of which FQL is probably the best known example. Adaplan is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern functional programming languages, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are PFL [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and Machiavelli [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998].
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